Author: Michael

Kind of Dramatic

I’m sick of this feeling
Of not understanding
The things that we’ve been through
The things we are planning
And where I fit into
This complex schematic
Better draw me a graphic
‘Cause I’m getting frantic
And panicking makes me
Act kind of dramatic
Like I’m in a movie
Surrounded by actors
Each part that they’re playing
Is one of the factors
Of the equation
I can’t understand it
Must’ve missed school that day
But it’s not like I planned it

Into this New World

The blank page does not frighten me, why would it? For what I see is no blank page but a portal, a mirror shining back at my imagination. It is a flood, a rush, a tumble through space and time, down a rabbit hole and then… are they, objects? Times and places appear to me like flickering projections: a piece of wood, a fishing hook, an anchor. Wait, is this… the sea?

A whale-creature larger than imagination looms out of the chaos, blaring like an air-raid siren, vibrating my bones and then I am it; the whale passing through me like some ghost, the mad ether churning around me. I need to stop spinning, I need to grab onto something. Hold on until the spinning stops.

Gasping, spluttering, I awaken. The horizon is ablaze with the thread of a blazing sun. I pick myself up from wherever I have fallen and I take my first few stumbling steps into this new world.

Elsinore’s Diary

“Silly old Samson. What an unassailable fool he is. He insists on keeping the hedges as father liked them and continues to sculpt the foliage into ridiculous shapes that are supposed to be animals.

I am sure that I offended him when I mistook his lion for a bear and his bear for a hippopotamus. Yet my comments seem only to have encouraged him further.

And so–on every morning of this balmy summer–I have been cursed to awaken to the sound of Samson’s shears clipping at the hedges, until naught will be left of them but scattered leaves and bare branches.”

— Excerpt from the diary of Elsinore Sinnet-Tierney

Witherbank

Reeds and Trees,
Mirrored by the water,
Darkened and muddy,
Each distorted reflection,
Looks down and wonders,
What if we are the ones,
Rippling on the surface,
Of some other river,
In an upside-down world.

The Michaelean Library

It is raining outside but the library is warm. There are no windows, only wall upon wall of shelves brimming with books. The titles of the books are blank until you cast your eye upon them, then: strange titles form on the bindings…

Storage of the Sacrosanct, Mystical Magnetics, Limitations of the Vatari, Whispering Trees, Animism and Telephony, Piracy in the Ether, The Temperance of Stone, Genetic Replication in Quantum Nanobots, Telurian Tactics, Husband and Wife, Strange Rituals of the Amplitudehedron, Chaos Magic and Facial Reformation, Arguments for Changdalean Ethics.

Containing Chaos, Flora of the Frostwood, Unholy Ziggurats, Territorial Disputes of Newlucia, Explorations of the Dreamscape, Sentient Continents, Fraid, Arcane Clockmaking, The Ten Disturbances, On Structures and Systems, Distant Transmissions, Cherax Society and Culture, A Square Between Two Spheres.

A Trip Around the Coil, Anachronistic Artefacts, Kuluck’s Way, Liminal Reflections, Unreplicable Experiments of T. Lewis, Images in Static, The Woman Who Laughs in the Dark, Khorkhoi Breeding Dens, Messianic Lovers, Alien Polymers, Son Lomas: City of Ghosts, Thuul Communication Systems, Witchcraft at 56k, The Singing Desert.

And a great many others. There is a comfortable reading chair and a crackling fireplace.